Beryl Hovis-Afflerbach

(she/they)

I am a second year PhD student and NSF GRFP fellow studying astronomy at Northwestern University.

I am interested in the metal-poor massive stars that inhabit high-redshift galaxies. These massive stars are observationally distinct from those in the local universe, and accurately modeling their radiation is crucial to interpreting the new observations of high-redshift galaxies from JWST. I plan to use rest-UV and rest-optical spectra of these galaxies alongside stellar evolution and population synthesis modeling to understand the emission from these stars and how we can implement it within our models of high-redshift galaxies.

My previous research includes modeling populations of massive stars stripped through binary interaction, using dimensionality reduction to detect errors in photometric redshift template fitting, and characterizing solar eruptions.

Publications

The Mass Distribution of Stars Stripped in Binaries: The Effect of Metallicity
Hovis-Afflerbach, B., Götberg, Y., Schootemeijer, A., Klencki, J., Strom, A. L., Ludwig, B. A., Drout, M. R., 2025, A&A accepted

Partially Erupted Prominence Material as a Diagnostic of Coronal Mass Ejection Trajectory
Hovis-Afflerbach, B., Thompson, B. J., & Mason, E. I., 2023, Space Weather, 21, e2022SW003256

Two New Methods for Counting and Tracking the Evolution of Polar Faculae
Hovis-Afflerbach, B. & Pesnell, W. D., 2022, Sol Phys, 297, 48

Identifying and Repairing Catastrophic Errors in Galaxy Properties Using Dimensionality Reduction
Hovis-Afflerbach, B., Steinhardt, C. L., Masters, D., & Salvato, M. 2021, ApJ, 908, 148

The BUFFALO HST Survey
Steinhardt, C. L., et al., incl. Hovis-Afflerbach, B., 2020, ApJS, 247, 1538


View my CV